Finding the Right College

GPA and How it Affects Your University Acceptance

There’s really nothing more important in your college application than the strength of your academics. Unlike essays and the SATs which can be polished in several weeks, your transcript is a culmination of four years of academic work you did in high school.

There’s little you can do to change your academic record. That is why admissions officers will always turn to the transcript before anything else. After all, to get an idea of how you will perform next time in college, it’s only logical to assess how you’ve been performing so far.

What courses you take in high school and what grades you get will determine where you end up getting accepted at. When colleges look at your folder, the first thing they will see is your transcript. They want to know if a student has challenged herself and if her grades show either an upward trend, a declining trend or have remained constant.

Challenged means taking the toughest courses you can handle. While you are encouraged to go for the most demanding schedule, you must be able to do well. No point taking the toughest courses if destroys your social and extra curricular activities.

Admissions officers can see that you’re trying too hard, and it may instead work against your favor in the college admissions process.

Grades in Advanced Placement Classes Versus Regular Classes
Of course, the best thing would be to get an A in an AP class. But most admissions officers would rather you get a B in the AP class. AP classes are much tougher than regular ones, and getting a B – despite the grade itself – shows that you can handle tough workloads.

If A grades were so important, then every student would try to pad his and her transcript with easy courses just so they could fatten their GPA. That is why grades alone are not enough.

An important thing to note here is that while colleges consider grades, they also consider your performance relative to your classmates. That is where class rank comes in. Class ranks help colleges determine whether the C you got in Calculus is a result of slacking on your part, or a really strict marking system.

If your school does not rank, don’t despair. Colleges are adept enough at coming up with a ranking for you based on your school profile and academic trend in your school report. Not all schools rank all the students in the class. Even if your school policy forbids ranking – as mine do – your transcript can still tell a great deal about what kind of challenges you went through in high school.

Know Your Goals
You academic preparation should also reflect your goals. What kind of school do you want to go to? If you are considering applying to highly selective colleges, then you should take as many AP classes as you can without harming your grades or extra curricular activities.

At really selective universities, you probably need all the As you can get from AP classes to be considered a top candidate. These universities are so competitive that B grades might not be enough.

On the other hand, some large state universities use a different set of rules. These schools attract tens of thousands of applications each year and so they often rely on grades and test scores to make preliminary decisions. Here GPA would be more important than the level of courses.

In other words, how tough your course selection was isn’t valued as much, as long as they are some college preparatory classes in it.

All Schools do not Offer AP Courses
If your school doesn’t offer AP English, and every senior takes regular English classes, then you just have to take the regular English class, you don’t have a choice.

If you come from a really competitive high school, you will be evaluated based on the school’s curriculum. Even if you don’t rank near the top, there are some schools who will accept you since you came from a really good school.

But if your high school isn’t so great, then it may be more important for you to rank near the top. A really good way to stand out in a selective pool is to go beyond what your school has to offer. This means doing things that are otherwise not offered in your school.

If you’ve studied all the physics courses in school, try taking up advanced courses at a local college. If you like math and finished calculus in junior year, try to take a more advanced class at a community college. These actions show admissions officials that you are intellectually curious and always ready to learn new things – a plus point in the admissions process.

Thanks to Criminal Justice School Finder for help with the information for this post: Go to Criminal Justice School Finder

Or read more at National Criminal Justice Association.